On Sunday, February 17th, nearly 50,000 people ventured out into the icy morning to gather at the Washington Monument in Washington, DC. There, braced against the biting February wind, the Forward on Climate Rally swelled into the largest climate march in history.

The focal point of the rally was to challenge President Obama to reject a proposal by the multinational corporation TransCanada to transport tar sands oil across the U.S through their under-construction Keystone XL pipeline. According to TransCanada’s claims, the project will contribute another tenth of 1 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. However, these figures do not account for emissions generated when refining the oil, transporting the oil, or future exploitation of tar sands oil reserves.* In his State of the Union address, the president voiced support for serious action to climate change, but significant federal action toward this goal is yet to be seen.

Officially, the rally was lead by the Sierra Club and the 350.org campaign. However, organizations and individual participants present on the ground gathered from a diversity of backgrounds from across the United States and Canada. Just a few of the radical movements and organizations present in DC last weekend were Idle No More, Occupy Sandy, and the Tar Sands Blockade.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no prevailing consensus at the rally concerning how to create an ecologically just society, or even what an ecologically just society might be. However, the tone of the event reflected a growing sense that the global climate crisis is inextricably bound with the problem of social oppression and inequality. At a large solidarity rally in San Fransisco lead by the Canadian indigenous rights movement, Idle No More, one activist summarized:

“It’s funny; the same things we need to do to stop climate change are the same things we need to do to stop poverty, austerity, and war.”

It’s true. The climate crisis can only be solved by the fundamental transformation of our social, political and economic systems to a directly democratic, free society. And while the old tensions between reformism and revolution linger, it’s still a thrill to see so many communities united on the streets of Washington DC, fighting for our future.

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* Climatologist James Hansen estimates that Alberta’s tar sands contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon, enough to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration by an additional 120 parts per million. The US Department of Energy says that mining and extracting oil from the tar sands releases 3 – 4.5 times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as conventional oil extraction. Sources: James Hansen, “Game Over for the Climate,” New York Times, May 9, 2012; US Department of Energy data, cited in Nathan Lemphers, “The climate implications of the proposed Keystone XL oilsands pipeline” (Calgary: Pembina Institute, 2013). –Editor

Eleanor Finley is an activist, author, and a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2012, she has been a board member and an organizer at the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE). She has written numerous articles about social ecology, the Kurdish movement, and the growing global movement for bottom-up democracy.

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One Comment

Matt Leonard
March 7, 2013 at 11:47 am

Thanks for the post Eleanor! As an ISE alum, and one of the organizers of the rally, it’s great to see a continually shrinking bridge between more radical ecology movements, and more “mainstream” campaigns. (sad, but often a truism or many social movements). This is something that 350.org works hard to do – to truly bring together vital parts of the movement that often don’t work together, or see each other as common allies. DC was a great moment to see that broad, and diverse movement that many of us have built over the years (and decades).

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The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:

"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions ofparticipatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.

This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework forcrafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less

Our first online course Ecology, Democracy, Utopia was a great success! In response to high demand we are now offering a self-directed course featuring the same video lectures, readings, and discussion forums but without the fixed time commitment of a weekly seminar. This allows for more flexible pa...

"Bookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In "Ecology of Freedom" (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In "The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship" (1987) and "Urbanisation without Cities" (1992), he proposed "libertarian municipalism" as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel "The Dispossessed" in part on Bookchin’s early work)..." ... See MoreSee Less